And in the mean time, while the two Emperors were reorganising the map of the world, and Félicia was reiterating her undying defiance of her husband, Helene still lay unconscious in the inn at Drinitza. The agonies of pain had passed, but she did not recover. She had not sufficient vitality, the doctors said, to rally from the shock and the long suffering, and it was not unlikely that her life would flicker out without so much as a return to consciousness. CHAPTER XXIV. _RISORGIMENTO._ As to Helene herself, the days and weeks passed by without her knowledge. Once only since the accident had she waked to a brief interval of full consciousness, and that was when the old home voices first penetrated her dulled ear. Her father and mother were in the room as well as Usk, and she lay looking at them without their perceiving it, making no attempt to speak. But when the Grand-Duchess broke down and wept stormily, crying out to Usk, “You stole her away from us, and this is the way you take care of her!” the injustice of the speech moved her to protest. She tried to speak, but no words would come, and though Usk met her anguished eyes, and nodded reassuringly at her, she could not vindicate him. She saw her father lay his hand upon his shoulder, as though he felt he was unjustly accused, but the Grand-Duchess was evidently implacable. Helene still struggled to speak, but the effort was too great, and she relapsed into immobility, which yet was not complete unconsciousness, for she was very conscious of pain, although the outer world was a blank to her. To herself she seemed to be borne and buffeted on a sea of pain; she sounded its lowest depths, and was carried up to the height of its hugest waves. There was the pain which attacked her in a succession of violent shocks, like billows breaking over a helpless shipwrecked man on a rocky shore, and swept her away at last into such agony that she was forced to scream; and the pain which crept upwards slowly and gradually, like a gently rising tide, until her whole frame seemed nothing but one dull, paralysing ache, and all kinds and degrees of pain between these two extremes. She battled against this sea, she thought, although in some strange way the sound of the breakers and the throb of the rising waves was inside her head and not outside, as though she was playing the traitor to herself, but it attacked her persistently in fresh ways, and she felt that it must prove the stronger at last. But just when her strength was altogether at an end, and she knew that she could struggle no longer, the necessity for struggling ceased. There was no sea at all, either rough or smooth, and she was drifting gently down a broad calm river. Sometimes she had glimpses of scenes on the banks, sometimes she heard strange toneless voices speaking loudly, although she could not distinguish what they said, but she never saw any place or person or heard any voice that she knew.